Usability Issues at Daily Work with OpenOffice.org

This page is under construction.

I'm working with (and spreading the word about) OpenOffice.org at work and found some issues that make it harder to work with the applications as it should be. I talked with Frank Loehmann from the User Experience Team a few times - thank you for your sympathetic ear, Frank! Also I reported most of the issues at IssueZilla. I hope this wiki page will call more attention to these issues and maybe some developers will fix it in the future.

Full List of Issues

3545 Easier Cropping and rotating of images (in Writer)

10459 Template Association (apply templates to existing documents)

10865 Moving/Copying - Single-Cell using click-n-drag

12989 Allow Page Templates to be linked

15530 Default filename for PDF export

18771 MSInteroperability-18: watermarks

20073 Q-PCD Enhance usability of the OpenOffice.org Template Manager

22405 An easy way to create watermarks with text

32141 manual page break with style change in masterdocument ignored

49754 loading pragraph styles removes outline numbering (FIXED 3.1)

52783 change templates for a document

64484 Option to remove all hard formatting controls from the UI (my issue)

65055 Keep small bullets as default in old documents (like sxw) (my issue)

Serious Usability Issues

It's very common that people want to edit images that they fit into the page structure. My collegues do that every day (with MS Word). Copying the image into Draw, cropping it, and copying it back to Writer is not a solution! The solution in Draw should be available in Writer too. I read in the Issue that OD is working on that maybe for OOo 3.2.

The current behavior of moving/copying one cell using the mouse is not intuitive (click on a cell, hold the mouse button and move the cursor to another cell, go back to the first cell and loose the mouse button; then move the cell to another position in the sheet). Some people said that patents hold back the implementation of a solution for this issue. Is there no workaround for this patent(s) possible?

If you use the "Find & Replace" dialog and if you select an item of "More Options" (backwards, regular expressions, etc.), next time you open the "F&R" dialog the "More Options" part will be not shown - but the item will be still selected.

It is not visible to the user that the "More Options" item is still selected, so it can (and will) be forgotten. Therefore the user can't find what s/he wants and doesn't know why.

Suggestion:
When opening the "Find & Replace" dialog, keep the whole dialog open as long as an item of the "More Options" part is selected.

88718 Show quantity of selected cells in the "Name Box" of the Formula Bar (application: Calc)

93938 Calc loses selected range in a sheet when going to another sheet (application: Calc)